Networking technologies, both wired and wireless, have changed the way people play and work in fundamental ways. For example, in the span of only a few years, the Internet has become an important communication and commercial channel for many companies and organizations. For some companies, organizations, and individuals, the availability and reliability of commercial network services (such as Internet hosting and other hosted networking services) are increasingly becoming a critical factor in their success.
The demand for commercial network services (“CNS”) has in turn created a market wherein various service providers (“SP's”) compete to provide the hardware and software infrastructure for fulfilling commercial network service needs (such as shared web hosting needs) of commercial network service customers. In the commercial network service market, a SP owns or controls a pool of hardware and software resources. Responsive to the particular requirements of a given commercial network service customer, a SP would configure a subset of the SP's available hardware and software resources to fulfill the commercial network service need.
The process of configuring the required hardware and software resources of a SP to furnish the required commercial network service to a customer is called service activation. Service activation thus bridges the gap between a customer commercial network service requirements and the SP's infrastructure configuration.
Generally speaking, SP's strive to perform service activation rapidly, accurately and in a cost-efficient manner. Rapid and accurate service activation tend to increase customer satisfaction and give the SP a competitive edge in the highly competitive commercial network service market.
Since the number of customers served by a given SP may be quite numerous, and the commercial network service requirement may vary from customer to customer, most SP's tend to employ highly specialized software and processes, known as a service activation solution, to automate as much as possible the service activation task. Furthermore, given the complexity of modern hardware and software, many SP's have discovered that they either lack the in-house talent necessary to develop the activation solution internally and/or it is more economical and efficient to contract the task of creating an activation solution to outside experts. The SP's demand for activation solutions, in turn, creates a market for system integrators (“SI's”), who are contracted by the SP's to create service activation solutions to enable the SP's to efficiently and rapidly activate the commercial network service for the SP's customers.
FIG. 1 illustrates the relationship between system integrators (“SI's”), service providers (“SP's”) and the SP's customers in the context of service activation. As shown in FIG. 1, a customer 102 may request commercial network service by furnishing commercial network service requirement 104 to a service provider 106. In the example of FIG. 1, customer 102 may request a shared web hosting service, and thus requirement 104 may include specifications such as the specific underlying servers (e.g., Unix), the quality of service (e.g., gold quality), the amount of disk space needed (e.g., 200 MB), the URL for the website to be hosted (e.g., www.mycompany.com), as well as other services such as anonymous FTP, web response time monitoring, and the like.
Requirement 104 may be inputted into an activation solution 110, which is provided to service provider 106 by system integrator 112. Generally speaking, activation solution 110 is created in advance by system integrator 112 for use by service provider 106. Depending on the particulars of customer requirement 104, activation solution 110 employs an appropriate subset of the hardware and software infrastructure 120 available to the SP, performs tasks 122 to appropriately configure the selected infrastructure subset. The result is a commercial network service 124 that satisfies the requirement 104 set forth by customer 102.
In the current art, the process for creating an activation solution (e.g., activation solution 110) for a SP generally involves a substantial amount of time and effort on the part of the SI. FIG. 2 is a flowchart illustrating a typical activation solution creation process, which is performed by a SI to create an activation solution for a SP. In block 202, the SI receives the service definition from the SP, including a detailed description of the commercial network service offerings to be activated by the activation solution as well as the process steps that the SP employs to activate a commercial network service for a customer.
In block 204, the SI analyzes the service definition furnished by the SP to determine whether there existed pre-built plug-ins, e.g., components, for handling some or all of the tasks to be performed in activating a service. If a required plug-in is not available, the SI either creates or obtains the plug-ins (206), e.g., from other service activator professionals who may sell or share such plug-ins.
Once all the plug-ins are ascertained to be available, the SI then analyzes (208) the individual atomic tasks that must be performed, the data I/O requirements of individual atomic tasks, as well as the sequencing and grouping of the atomic tasks in order to achieve service activation or an aspect of the service activation. In block 210, the SI further gains education on the process for developing compound tasks, activation workflows, inventory structure, and inventory population. A compound task is a group of atomic tasks to be performed together in a predefined sequence. An activation workflow is an encoding of the business process that the SP uses to carry out the provisioning or activation of an aspect of the commercial network service (CNS). Inventory structure refers to the inventory schema, or inventory map, of the hardware and software resource necessary to activate a given activation service request. Inventory population refers to the process by which instances of the hardware and software resources available to the SP are populated into the inventory structure. Generally speaking, SI needs to be familiar with the resources available to the SP as well as the process by which a subset of those resources can be appropriated for a particular commercial network service to be activated and the process steps which the SP employs to appropriately configure the selected subset of resources.
Once the SI gains the necessary knowledge regarding compound tasks, activation workflows, inventory structure, and inventory population, the SI may then construct the required compound tasks (212) by, for example, manually editing XML (Extensible Markup Language) files to combine specific atomic tasks. The constructed compound tasks are then tested in block 214. If the compound tasks function as expected, the SI then develops, in block 216, the inventory structure to support activation. In so doing, the SI may develop the inventory schema (i.e., a map of the required hardware and software resource) along with access functions required to query and update the inventory database.
At this point, the SI has ascertained the type of data contained in the customer activation request, the inventory structure, the compound tasks to be invoked, and the process steps that the SP employs to activate a commercial network service (CNS). In block 220, the SI then constructs the required activation workflows to connect the activation tasks (compound task execution, inventory operations, and the like). In block 222, the developed activation workflows of block 220 are tested in the context of the compound tasks and the SP's inventory. If these activation workflows do not function as expected, the SI ascertains in block 224 whether the problem resides with the compound tasks created in block 212, the inventory developed in block 216 or the workflows developed in block 220. Depending on the assessment made in block 224, the compound tasks may be fixed (in block 212), the inventory may be fixed (in block 216), and/or the workflows may be fixed in block 220.The process then repeats until the developed workflows pass the test of block 222.
In block 226, the SI develops a method for populating the inventory database with the actual hardware/software resources available to the SP. This inventory population mechanism represents the entity that actually inventories the real-world resources of the SP and provides such inventory data in an inventory database for service activation use. In block 228/230, the inventory population mechanism is tested. If the inventory population mechanism does not function as expected, the SI may need to fix the inventory population mechanism (back in block 226). On the other hand, if the inventory population mechanism functions as expected, the SI then develops any necessary integration (232) between activation solution and the customer's existing operation support systems (OSS) components. This integration is necessary to enable the activation solution to receive the actual user requirements during execution of the activation solution, for example. At this point, the SI can deploy the developed activation solution at the SP site for use by the SP in activating commercial network service for its customers (block 234). The SI may further document the activation solution (block 236) as well as perform any further quality control test at the production site, i.e., within the SP environment (block 238).
As can be appreciated from FIG. 2, the current process for creating an activation solution for a SP is quite complex and laborious. In essence, every activation solution is custom-crafted starting from the atomic tasks. Accordingly, the activation solution creation process remains an expensive and time-consuming endeavor.
What is desired, therefore, is an improved framework, arrangement, and/or process for creating activation solutions for SP's. The improved framework, arrangement, and/or process would ideally allow a SI to create and deliver an activation solution to a SP with less effort, in less time, and at a lower cost.